Graphic design and modernisation in Greece, 1945-1970

The primary aim of this work is to give voice to the silent history of graphic design in Greece, long uncharted and undocumented in both the international forum and the local design community. This study focuses on the professional modernisation of graphic design and its role in providing the means for change in Greek society. The research is supported by interdisciplinary analysis of commercial advertisements, posters, leaflets and magazines, as well as other supporting documentation, in the historical and cultural context of Athens, Greece from 1945 to 1970. The time examined was a transitional and vociferous period in the history of Greece, one of intense and rapid economic modernisation during the post-Second World War decades from the mid-1940s to 1970. This was a time when, along with broader changes in the social, economic and political life of Greece, important developments in design education, print technology, and professional organisation marked a new age for graphic design, as a profession emerging from the broader ‘graphic arts’ field (inclusive of both technological and creative processes) and claiming autonomy over the more established fine arts sector. All four chapters deal with modernisation in relation to the assumed divisions of traditional/modern, continuity/change, centre/periphery. Main areas of investigation are: trade organisation, graphic design education, advertising and urbanisation, electricity and tourism promotion. This research offers a view of the ways the ‘modern’ and the condition of modernity were experienced in the case of Greece through certain applications of graphic design and its agents of influence: graphic designers, artists, managers, publishers, the state and private entrepreneurs. The research benefited significantly from a number of interviews with design professionals and related individuals. The present endeavour has a modest aim: to enable understanding of how and why Greek graphic design at the time came to be, and to stress the validity of the visual as a means of historical documentation.

Mid-Century Molecular: The Material Culture of X-ray Crystallographic Visualisation across Postwar British Science and Industrial Design

This thesis investigates the use and significance of X-ray crystallographic visualisations of molecular structures in postwar British material culture across scientific practice and industrial design. It is based on research into artefacts from three areas: X-ray crystallographers’ postwar practices of visualising molecular structures using models and diagrams; the Festival Pattern Group scheme for the 1951 Festival of Britain, in which crystallographic visualisations formed the aesthetic basis of patterns for domestic objects; and postwar furnishings with a ‘ball-and-rod’ form and construction reminiscent of those of molecular models. A key component of the project is methodological. The research brings together subjects, themes and questions traditionally covered separately by two disciplines, the history of design and history of science. This focus necessitated developing an interdisciplinary set of methods, which results in the reassessment of disciplinary borders and productive cross-disciplinary methodological applications. This thesis also identifies new territory for shared methods: it employs network models to examine cross-disciplinary interaction between practitioners in crystallography and design, and a biographical approach to designed objects that over time became mediators of historical narratives about science. Artefact-based, archival and oral interviewing methods illuminate the production, use and circulation of the objects examined in this research. This interdisciplinary approach underpins the generation of new historical narratives in this thesis. It revises existing histories of the cultural transmissions between X-ray crystallography and the production and reception of designed objects in postwar Britain. I argue that these transmissions were more complex than has been acknowledged by historians: they were contingent upon postwar scientific and design practices, material conditions in postwar Britain and the dynamics of historical memory, both scholarly and popular. This thesis comprises four chapters. Chapter one explores X-ray crystallographers’ visualisation practices, conceived here as a form of craft. Chapter two builds on this, demonstrating that the Festival Pattern Group witnesses the encounter between crystallographic practice, design practice and aesthetic ideologies operating within social networks associated with postwar modernisms. Chapters three and four focus on ball-and-rod furnishings in postwar and present-day Britain, respectively. I contend that strong relationships between these designed objects and crystallographic visualisations, for example the appellation ‘atomic design’, have been largely realised through historical narratives active today in the consumption of ‘retro’ and ‘mid-century modern’ artefacts. The attention to contemporary historical narratives necessitates this dual historical focus: the research is rooted in the period from the end of the Second World War until the early 1960s, but extends to the history of now. This thesis responds to the need for practical research on methods for studying cross-disciplinary interactions and their histories. It reveals the effects of submitting historical subjects that are situated on disciplinary boundaries to interdisciplinary interpretation. Old models, such as that of unidirectional ‘influence’, subside and the resulting picture is a refracted one: this study demonstrates that the material form and meaning of crystallographic visualisations, within scientific practice and across their use and echoes in designed objects, are multiple and contingent.

The Design with Intent Method: a design tool for influencing user behaviour

Using product and system design to influence user behaviour offers potential for improving performance and reducing user error, yet little guidance is available at the concept generation stage for design teams briefed with influencing user behaviour. This article presents the Design with Intent Method, an innovation tool for designers working in this area, illustrated via application to an everyday human–technology interaction problem: reducing the likelihood of a customer leaving his or her card in an automatic teller machine. The example application results in a range of feasible design concepts which are comparable to existing developments in ATM design, demonstrating that the method has potential for development and application as part of a user-centred design process.

Making the user more efficient: Design for sustainable behaviour

User behaviour is a significant determinant of a product’s environmental impact; while engineering advances permit increased efficiency of product operation, the user’s decisions and habits ultimately have a major effect on the energy or other resources used by the product. There is thus a need to change users’ behaviour. A range of design techniques developed in diverse contexts suggest opportunities for engineers, designers and other stakeholders working in the field of sustainable innovation to affect users’ behaviour at the point of interaction with the product or system, in effect ‘making the user more efficient’. Approaches to changing users’ behaviour from a number of fields are reviewed and discussed, including: strategic design of affordances and behaviour-shaping constraints to control or affect energyor other resource-using interactions; the use of different kinds of feedback and persuasive technology techniques to encourage or guide users to reduce their environmental impact; and context-based systems which use feedback to adjust their behaviour to run at optimum efficiency and reduce the opportunity for user-affected inefficiency. Example implementations in the sustainable engineering and ecodesign field are suggested and discussed.

Exploring design patterns for sustainable behaviour

Products and services explicitly intended to influence users’ behaviour are increasingly being proposed to reduce environmental impact and for other areas of social benefit. Designing such interventions often involves adopting and adapting principles from other contexts where behaviour change has been studied. The ‘design pattern’ form, used in software engineering and HCI, and originally developed in architecture, offers benefits for this transposition process. This article introduces the Design with Intent toolkit, an idea generation method using a design pattern form to help designers address sustainable behaviour problems. The article also reports on exploratory workshops in which participants used the toolkit to generate concepts for redesigning everyday products—kettles, curtains, printers and bathroom sinks/taps—to reduce the environmental impact of use. The concepts are discussed, along with observations of how the toolkit was used by participants, suggesting usability improvements to incorporate in future versions.

Designing motivation or motivating design? Exploring Service Design, motivation and behavioural change

Motivation researcher Edward Deci has suggested that if we want behavioural change to be sustainable, we have to move past thinking of motivation as something that we ‘do’ to other people and see it rather as something that we as Service Designers can enable service users to ‘do’ by themselves. In this article, Fergus Bisset explores the ways in which Service Designers can create more motivating services. Dan Lockton then looks at where motivating behaviour via Service Design often starts, with the basic ‘pinball’ and ‘shortcut’ approaches. We conclude by proposing that if services are to be sustainable in the long term, we as Service Designers need to strive to accommodate humans' differing levels of motivation and encourage and support service users' sense of autonomy within the services we design.

Design for sustainability: making green behaviour easy

Design can enable sustainable behaviour by understanding everyday needs rather than treating people as the problem.

Design for repair: empowering consumers to fix the future

By understanding how everyday devices work, individuals can – with the help of a growing online community – enjoy extending the life of products and drive socially responsible design.

Design Without Borders: A Multi-Everything Masters

Design is increasingly a global activity: addressing issues that challenge and affect people and populations other than our own, involving stakeholders from many cultures, realized through borderless networks of knowledge, services, materials, manufacturing and distribution. There is an appetite among graduates, especially in design and engineering, to broaden horizons and raise ambitions, to tackle big issues through innovation to bring about life-changing or world-changing impact. Employers demand such thinkers and doers: culturally attuned, multidisciplinary and T-shaped, unafraid to shake things up. In 2013, twelve postgraduates embarked on a new joint Masters course in London; students from eight different nations, studying together in three capital cities over two years. This programme is a collaboration between four centres of academic excellence in UK, USA and Japan; these students soon become its first graduating cohort, having experienced differing teaching styles, perspectives and specialisms around design, technology and innovation from four world-class institutions; immersion in three very different cultures; collaboration with students and faculty from many diverse disciplines and cultures; forming friendships and networks spanning the globe. This paper outlines the rationale and philosophy of the course, the challenges in its realisation and development so far, and its likely future evolution.

I Cling to Virtue

Kular’s work centres on design as a means of engaging with social and cultural issues. Commissioned and exhibited by the V&A Museum, this was a mixed-media collection revealing the trajectories of the Lövy-Singh clan, a fictional East London family of mixed descent. It comprised 26 sculptures and two video pieces, developing the previous explorations of the MacGuffin in narrative (Kular REF Output 2). A catalogue with 28 fictional reminiscences, a genealogy and time line positioned the family’s experiences in geographical locations and historical events. Novel use of rapid-prototyping co-opted an industry process to confuse the experience of artefact and artifice. The design explored the historical, literary and cinematic traditions of the family saga and its relationship to memory and artefact. It presented an archive of objects derived from the flawed, biased memory of the (fictional) curator. A coherent story is replaced by one that is multiple and fragmentary. Kular and Toran (RCA) ‘produced’ the family by mixing their own genealogies with those of renowned 20th-century families, both real and fictional, such as the Magnificent Ambersons and the Rothschilds, positioning family members in everyday situations or key historical moments represented by an object and a ‘memory’ triggered by the object. Concept development was undertaken jointly by Kular and Toran. Kular’s archive research emphasised commonwealth immigrant histories and British 20th-century political events. His production contribution was in 3D modelling, rapid prototyping and display, leading production of the two films and development and editing of the narrative texts. The work was accompanied by a catalogue (2011), was reviewed in ICON Magazine (2010), discussed in an article by Hayward, Jones, Toran and Kular in Design and Culture (2013), and featured in The White Review (No. 2). It was re-exhibited in the group show ‘Politique Fiction’ at la Cité du design, Saint-Étienne, France (2013).

Digital Technologies and the Museum Experience

This co-edited book focuses on core theories and research on technologies, from the first audio guides to contemporary and future mobile digital devices, which inform practical design considerations. It is framed in case studies and focuses generally on informal learning by museum and gallery visitors. The book fills a significant gap in the literature on museum practice with regard to uses of digital technologies, which are not generally grounded in rigorous research, and is intended to retain its relevance as technologies evolve and emerge. The book includes chapters by invited authors from the USA, UK and Europe who contribute expertise in a number of areas of museum research and practice. The research resulted in invited keynote speeches in France (‘Technologie de l’apprentissage humain dans les musées’ seminar at Laboratoire d’Informatique de Grenoble on 5 March 2009), Iceland (keynote at ‘NODEM Network of Design and Digital Heritage’ conference on 3 December 2008) and London (Keynote at ‘Mobile Learning Conference’ on 26 January 2009). The book was given the highest recommendation ('Essential') by the American Library Association, and was reviewed in MedieKultur (2011, 50, 185–92). Walker’s chapter includes some of the initial findings from his PhD research on visitor-constructed trails in museums, which shifts focus from the design of technologies to the design of activities intended to structure the use of technologies, and constitutes some of the first published research on visitor-generated trails using mobile technologies. Structures such as trails are shown to act as effective mental models for museum visitors, especially structures with a narrow subject focus and manageable amount of data capture; those created as a narrative or a conversation; and those that emphasise construction, rather than data capture. Walker also selected most of the other chapter authors, suggested their topics and led the editing of the publication.

Exploring the Roles of Technology and Social Play in Art Museums

This co-written chapter was included in an edited book featuring invited authors from different countries and different areas of museum research and practice. The chapter uses a theory of play by Johan Huizinga (1938) to frame case studies of play-based interactive experiences in museums in various countries. The aim was to use theory to ground museum practice, in order to evaluate existing practical implementations as well as to inform the design of new ones. The book was nominated as one of the 10 best museum education books of 2011 by Museum Education Monitor, and the chapter led to a subsequent technology residency the author undertook in the Spike Island gallery, Bristol in 2012, funded by the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts, Arts and Humanities Research Council and Arts Council England. It also informed his subsequent postgraduate teaching, an example of which is a recent MA project, which deconstructs play from a computational perspective. Collaborations have continued with the co-author, which have resulted in a number of invited lectures. In this chapter the authors explore play as a structure for supporting visitor learning, drawing from international research in museums and interaction design. Four aspects of play first proposed by Huizinga are explored – the free-choice aspect of play, play as distinct from real life, play as an ordering structure, and the role of play in bridging communities. The chapter argues that play provides museums with ready-made structures and concepts, which can help planning for visitor learning. The research was equally divided between the co-authors, who developed the conceptual and theoretical aspects of the article by drawing on their own research alongside key examples of museum design and digital media.

A Designer’s Approach: Exploring how Autistic Adults with Additional Learning Disabilities Experience their Home Environment

Autistic adults with limited speech and additional learning disabilities are people whose perceptions and interactions with their environment are unique, but whose experiences are under-explored in design research. This PhD by Practice investigates how people with autism experience their home environment through a collaboration with the autism charity Kingwood Trust, which gave the designer extensive access to a community of autistic adults that it supports. The PhD reflects upon a neurotypical designer’s approach to working with autistic adults to investigate their relationship with the environment. It identifies and develops collaborative design tools for autistic adults, their support staff and family members to be involved. The PhD presents three design studies that explore a person’s interaction with three environmental contexts of the home i.e. garden, everyday objects and interiors. A strengths-based rather than a deficit-based approach is adopted which draws upon an autistic person’s sensory preferences, special interests and action capabilities, to unravel what discomfort and delight might mean for an autistic person; this approach is translated into three design solutions to enhance their experience at home. By working beyond the boundaries of a neurotypical culture, the PhD bridges the autistic and neurotypical worlds of experience and draws upon what the mainstream design field can learn from designing with autistic people with additional learning disabilities. It also provides insights into the subjective experiences of people who have very different ways of seeing, doing and being in the environment

Tackling Ageing Continence through Theory, Tools & Technology (TACT3)

The complexity of issues surrounding continence management, have been investigated by a UK multi-disciplinary research team working under the project title Tackling Ageing Continence through Theory Tools and Technology (TACT3). The team comprising engineers, chemists, health researchers, designers and social anthropologists is funded by the New Dynamics of Ageing Programme, ‘a seven year multidisciplinary research initiative with the ultimate aim of improving quality of life of older people. The programme is a unique collaboration between five UK Research Councils , and is the largest and most ambitious research programme on ageing ever mounted in the UK’ (www.newdynamics.group.shef.ac.uk). The TACT3 project comprises four work packages that are individually managed by members of the research team. One work package focuses solely on knowledge transfer of the research outputs and the management of the overall project. Another work package, entitled ‘Challenging Environmental Barriers’ has focused on the barriers in the built environment that prevent older people with continence concerns from participating in wider social life, namely access to publicly available toilet facilities. We also have a work package entitled ‘Improving Continence Interventions and Services’ which is exploring patient, carer and service providers experiences in receiving and delivering National Health Service (NHS) continence management treatments. The fourth workpackage ‘Developing Assistive Technologies’ has worked with users to develop devices that promote confidence, improve health and therefore may facilitate greater social interaction for older people with continence management concerns.

Designing Out Medical Error, WCDH Boston 2011

This talk is about using research and design to reduce medical errors. It doesn’t matter whether you deliver healthcare in the old-fashioned pathogenic way, or salutogenically, it all falls apart if systems and protocols let the patient down, and harm them.